IFS and Intact seal new cooperation

The IFS Food Store Standard is part of the IFS standard family. It is directed at retailers and offers a tool for assessing the food safety at various points of sale. The increasing number of participating stores and the lively interest in this standard underline its importance. This trend has led IFS to develop a professional IT solution. Therefore IFS brought Intact on board and we sealed this new cooperation in Kuala Lumpur.

But what exactly is the IFS Food Store Standard? This standard was developed for retailers in order to support them in assessing the food safety at their points of sale. The goals of this standard are to establish a uniform evaluation system, to get to work exclusively with accredited inspection bodies and highly qualified inspectors and to facilitate comparability and transparency between the individual points of sale. Thanks to the IFS Food Store Standard, retailers can now guarantee their desired level of safety and quality for food products without having to develop their own standards. An additional benefit is the possibility to benchmark the individual points of sale across national borders and thus manage internal improvement processes. Furthermore, retailers show their industry and logistics partners that they are not afraid of being measured to the same standards.

A software solution that provides a perfect overview

IFS was looking for a solution that would facilitate the jobs of all those who conduct their work according to the IFS Food Store Standard. Stephan Tromp, Managing Director of IFS, explains, “We want to offer certification bodies, retailers and IFS an ideal cooperation platform. Each user at this platform is only able to see those data for which he is authorized. Furthermore, retailers are given the possibility to perform comprehensive analyses and evaluations of their stores and to conduct anonymous regional or national benchmarks”. In order to achieve this, IFS brought Intact on board. At the Food Safety Conference in Kuala Lumpur, the cooperation was sealed. The solution to meet the requirements of IFS will be an audit platform that is based on Intact’s Ecert software.

The IFS Food Store Standard, which was introduced in 2014, has already been adopted by seven renowned retailers in France. At present, approximately 4,000 inspections are carried out according to this standard. The goal that IFS expects to achieve with the new platform is to increase this number to 10,000.